Who Are You Listening To?

    The heat is on! Well, it was anyway.
    We were a little warm in church last week. The auditorium was fine, but the lobby? Something was definitely wrong. It was bad enough that we had no air on a 90° day, a day we had planned extra fellowship in the new lobby after our 4:00 PM annual celebration. The lobby was so hot we had to move the food into the auditorium where it was cool. But you wouldn’t believe Monday morning. It was 96° in there when I arrived and the heat was ON! Yes….THE FURNACE WAS RUNNING! Since both lobby thermostats were set to A/C, and since the furnace was running when the air clearly should have been, we kind of thought there might be a problem (smart people that we are). Even after completely shutting down the system from both thermostats, the heat kept running. The lobby became as hot as 98 degrees by the time we were able to cut the power to all units.
    The HVAC people finally came on Tuesday to solve the problem. Come to find out, the technician had programmed the thermostats wrong when he installed them last fall. They worked fine for winter heat, but the programming for summer cool sent the wrong message to the units and while the thermostat was telling us that it was asking for A/C, the message was being sent to the heating units running the furnaces. I’m still confused as to why the heat kept running even after we turned the system off.
    Just about everything mechanical or electrical today is run by computers: cars, cameras, HVAC units. If the computer is incorrectly programmed, whatever unit it is sending signals to will operate incorrectly. Data in, data out.
    Both Solomon and Paul talked about that. They lived too long ago to be familiar with computer programming, but they understood human nature. If we take in faulty programming, our thinking gets messed up, which then is reflected in our choices/behavior.
    Where does that input come from? Well, we get it from the people and influences we surround ourselves with: friends, teachers, co-workers, television and other entertainment sources, even churches. Its pretty important that we pay attention to who and what we are listening to because invariable, without a pretty good filter (God’s Word), the influences we surround ourselves with impact in a major way the decisions we make and the lifestyles we choose. Solomon said this, “He who walks with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm” (Proverbs 13:20). The Apostle Paul put it this way, “Bad company corrupts good character” (1 Corinthians 15:33).
    Who are you hanging out with? Who are you listening to?